A History of the Etruscan people including their cities, art, society, rulers and contributions to civilization

By: Robert Guisepi

2002

Religion and mythology

The essential ingredient in
Etruscan religion was a belief that human life was but one small meaningful
element in a universe controlled by gods who manifested their nature and their
will in every facet of the natural world as well as in objects created by
humans. This belief permeates the Etruscan representational arts, where one
finds rich depictions of land, sea, and air, with man integrated into the
ambient. Roman writers give repeated evidence that the Etruscans regarded every
bird and every berry as a potential source of knowledge of the gods and that
they had developed an elaborate lore and attendant rituals for using this
knowledge. Their own myths explained the lore as having been communicated by the
gods through a prophet, Tages, a miraculous child with the features of a wise
old man who sprang from a plowed furrow in the fields of Tarquinii and sang out
the elements of what the Romans called the Etrusca disciplina.

The literary, epigraphic, and monumental
sources provide a glimpse of a cosmology whose image of the sky with its
subdivisions is reflected in consecrated areas and even in the viscera of
animals. The concept of a sacred space or area reserved for a particular deity
or purpose was fundamental, as was the corollary theory that such designated
areas could correspond to each other. Heaven reflected Earth, and macrocosm
echoed microcosm. The celestial dome was divided into 16 compartments inhabited
by the various divinities: major gods to the east, astral and terrestrial divine
beings to the south, infernal and inauspicious beings to the west, and the most
powerful and mysterious gods of destiny to the north. The deities manifested
themselves by means of natural phenomena, principally by lightning. They also
revealed themselves in the microcosm of the liver of animals (typical is a
bronze model of a sheep's liver found near Piacenza, bearing the incised names
of divinities in its 16 outside divisions and in its internal divisions).

These conceptions are linked closely to the
art of divination for which the Etruscans were especially famous in the ancient
world. Public and private actions of any importance were undertaken only after
having interrogated the gods; negative or threatening responses necessitated
complex preventive or protective ceremonies. The most important form of
divination was haruspicy, or hepatoscopy--the study of the details of the
viscera, especially the livers, of sacrificial animals. Second in importance was
the observation of lightning and of such other celestial phenomena as the flight
of birds (also important in the religion of the Umbri and of the Romans).
Finally, there was the interpretation of prodigies--extraordinary and marvelous
events observed in the sky or on the earth. These practices, extensively adopted
by the Romans, are explicitly attributed by the ancient authors to the religion
of the Etruscans.

Etruscans recognized numerous deities (the
Piacenza liver lists more than 40), and many are unknown today. Their nature was
often vague, and references to them are fraught with ambiguity about number,
attributes, and even gender. Some of the leading gods were eventually equated
with major deities of the Greeks and Romans, as may be seen especially from the
labeled representations on Etruscan mirrors. Tin or Tinia was equivalent to
Zeus/Jupiter, Uni to Hera/Juno, Sethlans to Hephaestus/Vulcan, Turms to
Hermes/Mercury, Turan to Aphrodite/Venus, and Menrva to Athena/ Minerva. But
their character and mythology often differed sharply from that of their Greek
counterparts. Menrva, for example, an immensely popular deity, was regarded as a
sponsor of marriage and childbirth, in contrast to the virgin Athena, who was
much more concerned with the affairs of males. Many of the gods had healing
powers, and many of them had the authority to hurl a thunderbolt. There were
also deities of a fairly orthodox Greco-Roman character, such as Hercle
(Heracles) and Apulu (Apollo), who were evidently introduced directly from
Greece yet came to have their designated spaces and cults.